Stop sign #4 – I am not educated in art and photography. Answer: Praise the Lord God Almighty you aren’t! Get over it and take some photos. There are many highly educated ‘artists’ who are picking their noses watching TV and eating too much instead of using their talents. They aren’t worth doodoo compared to one person with passion and vision even without a formal education. What matters is the doing. If you do the work you will learn.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t things to learn in a formal setting, there are. I have 2 degrees in art because I wanted to learn. I learned about printmaking, drawing, art history, certain artmaking techniques, and a bit about the art world.
But I had no formal training as a photographer at all. My sole educational work in photography was about 3-4 sessions in a dark room during grad school with another student who taught me the basics in exchange for me teaching him the basics of lithography. The truth is the vast majority of my creativity and my end results as an artist are not a function of my formal education, they are a function of my desire and my passion.
There is a woman on Flickr, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, probably the most visited of all the millions on flickr. She was doing pencil portraits when she found flickr and decided to try photography. Within 2 years she had 3 million views and a contract with Toyota to photograph their cars. She is a single mother of 2 sons. She lives in….ICELAND! She is as far from the center of the photography and art world as you can imagine. But she didn’t use that as an excuse. She didn’t use her children as an excuse. She didn’t use her lack of photography education as an excuse. What she did was go out into the middle of the dark Icelandic winter and take photos of 100-200 second exposures in FREEZING cold. She is now getting an art education, but the point is she didn’t wait. She went and ACTED.
Part 3 of a 10 part series on stop signs in your head that keep you from creating art.
Stop sign #3 – My equipment isn’t good enough. Answer: Then you would have to explain why photographer’s work from 75-100 years ago are worth thousands and esteemed the world over as great photographs when their equipment sucked compared to ours now. Even if all you have is a point and shoot, it is YOU that makes the photo great, not the camera.
This photo, by my friend Aikithereska on flickr, was made with a rudimentary pinhole camera. No aperture, no shutter speed, just a hole in a box. You can’t get any more primitive photographic equipment than that. And she got a great photo out of it.
The point is, lack of equipment is an excuse and shows a lack of imagination. Go out and take photos with what you have, quit waiting for a better something.
“A Genius is someone who simply has fewer stop signs in their head.”
Each day for this week and next I am telling about 10 stop signs to creativity that I have learned about over the years.
Stop sign #2 – It’s not perfect. Answer: According to who? If it is a print and is too green, blurred, flared, dark, whatever. Then collage it with something that makes that ‘negative’ stand out. An art piece is not limited to one photo all by itself. Draw on it, Cut it in stripes and layer it over the same exact shot you took that is good. Cut the worst part of the image out and tack that bad part on your wall, look at it, find something in it. Keep tacking up the pad parts until you find something interesting.
If it is a digital image in your computer, make a copy of it, then do special effects on it up the wazoo until it is something cool or at least you learned something. Go to the extreme with each setting, see how far you can take it.
The point is waiting for perfection is an excuse. It shows lack of creativity and imagination and it shows a worry about what others will think instead of seeing things through original eyes.
“A Genius is someone who simply has fewer stop signs in their head.” part 1
This week and next I am dedicating to those things that keep YOU from doing art. I have 10 ‘Stop Signs’ that can stop you in your creative tracks faster than a head-on with a semi. They may seem harsh, but that is because they are. Just imagine Simon Cowell talking to an artist instead of a singer and you will get the attitude I am trying to put forth here.
Stop sign #1 – it’s boring. Answer: No, YOU are boring. Not the place, person or event. If you can’t take interesting photos wherever you are, then YOU aren’t interesting and you aren’t interesting because you aren’t INTERESTED in the world around you. Look at details, look from the floor, look straight down, look in a corner.
I saw this as we were walking into Eskimo Joe’s in Stillwater, Oklahoma. It was the hostess leaning up against the glass brick seen from outside and it was as boring a scene as you can imagine. I bet thousand of people have gone by that glass brick when someone was leaning up against it and not one noticed or took a photo. Why not? Because they didn’t expect to see anything worth noticing and weren’t paying attention. Pay attention to unexpected angles and views.
Another in my ‘Rejection Suite’ made of job application rejection letters on top of which I collaged self-rejected photos of mine. In each case I left showing certain words from the letter that hit me.
The Guillotine image came because of the bright red photo I had of the side of a vintage restored car. It had it on my art table with the yellow square next to it and saw the possibility of a head rolling out of the yellow square, simple as that. Thanks to Cyndi, my former sister-in-law for letting her head roll in this image.
Day four of the week long rejection suite images. The idea behind this series wasn’t just to do something with the rejection letters, it was to do something with the rejected photographs I had taken over the years. This collage is an example of that, using a boring ocean photo, two portraits that were just lighting experiments, and a flared and blurred photo of who the hell knows what. Each by themselves wouldn’t be of much interest but when put together with other images they certainly have much more value and purpose.
I like this one because of the simplicity of the statement that I allowed to show through combined with the scary tribal type face image. But I also love it because of personal reasons, the woman is my ex-sister-in-law and she was the model who would be enthusiastic about most anything I would suggest to do, including getting her face painted as seen here. Also the background is a very memorable image from my ex-wife’s house. The blinds would make a beautiful pattern with the sunlight in the late afternoon and there was a hanging stained glass piece in the window that would cast it’s color with the blinds straight lines.
This is the second in a week long posting of a series I did from about 1986-1993. This is one of my favorite of the series because I love the transition of the ocean and the clouds into her body and the dimension brought in by the hedge/sidewalk image on the right side.
I love the simplicity of the statement as well. ‘Know you know’.
The Rejection Suite – A new week, a new series of old. This one is my ‘rejection letter’ series. I applied for full-time, college level teaching jobs in fine art for approximately 8 years, from 1985-1993. I never did land that job. I started to take the rejection letters and collage some of my rejected photos on top of the letter. I let show through from the letter a word or series of words that had power and meaning out of context.
This page was filled with questions that I answered by using letter press letters (the old fashion way, before digital, of graphic designing text with fonts). The model and I were at the beach in Santa Cruz, California and I took close ups of her against a cliff to collage. These were from the proof sheet that was made of the shots.
